An Asian-American
Yale student explains
why
she is afraid to go to the Harvard Game. Reading this, I find
myself wondering whether things were this bad when I was there--was
I that oblivious?--when football became so important even at the
Ivy League that administration doesn't want to investigate
a violent crime against a student, and what genius decided
to reintroduce fraternity houses.
Carol Lloyd
discusses the
fuzzy line
between artists and invading yuppies in San Francisco, and the
difficulties of defining, let alone resisting, gentrification.
The distinctive
sound
of falling snowflakes on water can be used to monitor the
weather in remove areas and on the open ocean.
Everything
is connected to everything else: changes in
winter
air pressure over the North Atlantic affect the growth of
balsam fir trees on an island in Lake Superior. No chaos theory
needed here, just a thorough study of cause and effect--air pressure
to snow to the hunting patterns of wolves to moose to trees.
Okay, this
one is gross and pointless--but it's also very funny.
Vegan
dogs in elk crosses an actual thread from rec.dogs with some
very odd pictures made at a pre-Halloween party. Julia Tenney
has asked me to note that she was the photographer. Hi, Julia!
Powell's
Books has a good
interview with
Susie Bright, who has a new book out: the interview was conducted
by email, and both Bright and the interviewer have interesting things
to say about talking about sex and about the way sex is used to
sell everything without ever being discussed honestly.
In a discussion
on rec.arts.sf.fandom, Jo Walton provides a particularly vivid
experience of what it was like
needing
glasses, and eventually getting them, as a child.
Guinea
Pig Zero, a journal for human research subjects, is primarily
a paper publication, but this Website presents a statement of purpose
and a few articles from the magazine, including a discussion of
a strike by some of the first paid human subjects.
A few thoughts
on epinions:
for me, it's a quick and easy way to plug something. I'm fond of this
Weblog, but the format more or less limits it to Web links. I've been
using epinions to drop in comments on things like places to visit
and the occasional rant. A friend refers to it as "fencing off the
commons," but it doesn't feel that way to me--it's more like
offering a convenient bus service down to the common, at least
for the moment, since membership means they might pay you (if you
write) and those whose material you read, not that you have to pay
them. I suspect that, like reading and posting to
Usenet, epinions is draining a bit of energy that could go to
more serious writing, whether essays or more in-depth book
reviews, but the same could be said of this log, and I do all three
because I enjoy them. And yes, it doesn't hurt that epinions will
be sending me a bit of money--I doubt any of their reviewers will
make enough to pay the rent, but it'll buy a book or two, and I'm
probably getting some readers there who don't look at either this
log or my home page.
Like many sites, though, epinions is ignoring that this is the
World Wide Web--I get micropayments for my opinions, but
if you live in Britain or Singapore, or anywhere outside North
America, you won't, because they didn't want to take the trouble
to figure out how to pay you.
Remember,
correlation is not causation: a study claims that
high-school males who have been "involved in a pregnancy" are
more
likely to engage in behaviors that increase their risk of injury
or death, such as carrying a gun to school. Interestingly,
the press release never explains what it means to be "involved in"
a pregnancy--does this mean they impregnated a woman, or were in
the same household as a pregnant woman, or accompanied their
girlfriends to the obstetrician, or told all their friends "Hey,
guys, I'm a man, I got a girl pregnant"? (It can't mean that they
"came into the world in the usual way," because then where do you
get the control group?) Possibly interesting study, but get me rewrite!
How much
damage does computer crime really cause, and
how
do they come up with those numbers?
[via More
Like This]
A graphic
demonstration of
the dangers of the proposed UK
Electronic Commerce Bill--this particular demo, if the law
is passed, could send the Home Secretary to jail even though all
agree he hasn't committed a crime here: the organization has sent
him a PGP-encrypted confession, then burned the only copy of the key.
The British
Xeno-transplantation Interim Regulatory Authority has several
suggested
rules for preventing the spread of animal viruses in patients who
receive organs from pigs. Most important, they would be
required never to have children, and specifically to "use
barrier contraception consistently and for life." They would also
be forbidden to give blood, and their sexual partners would be
monitored. It's not clear how any of this would be enforced,
especially if the patients traveled outside the UK.
The world's
youngest
natural language is the result of an unintended experiment:
untrained teachers at a
school for deaf children in Nicaragua didn't know how to teach them
any language, and the children have gradually invented their own.
At this point, linguists are studying them, and have decided not
to teach them any of the world's other sign languages, so the
world's newest linguistic community is also one of its smallest
and most isolated. [registration required]
But is
it art? Two British art students staged a half-naked pillow fight on a
bed in a gallery: the bed is someone else's artwork.
One of them said that "We wanted to
push her work to further limits, make it more
sensational, interesting and significant." They also say they want the
public to think about what is art. The gallery has decined to
press charges.
Peter is working at epinions
these days, and asked for examples of people stretching the
form a little. This seemed like a good excuse to write up the
rant
that's been floating in my head for a while, about people who can't
seem to walk in a crowd, or even understand that sidewalks are
intended for walking, not just for staring at the tall buildings.
An interesting
legal point: "Benito" Giuliani is suing the Brooklyn Museum because
he doesn't like one of the artworks currently on exhibit. Specifically,
he's trying to evict the museum, which leads to an interesting
question: on the off-chance he wins,
where
will the museum take its art? Get your bids in now: a
billion-dollar collection could come to your city!
[registration required]
Planting
trees is a fine thing--but it
won't
reduce global warming. The model that claims that it will ignores
a time lag in changes in the carbon cycle. The problem is that the
US and other industrialized countries want to "balance" carbon
emissions from industry by planting trees; if trees have no effect,
or even increase warming, we could all be underwater sooner than
anticipated.
The creator
has this filed under "bad ideas": Doom as a tool for
system
administration. As he notes, "development is hindered by
guys with shotguns killing my shell windows." Therefore, he is
making the source public for anyone else who wants to
have guys with shotguns killing their vital system
processes.
Where
the nukes were: American atomic weapons have been, and some still
are, in a number of countries, including Morocco, Greenland, and
Korea, as well as Britain. This article is based on documents
obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and some inference. For
strategic and political reasons,
the US government won't confirm or deny anything except to state
that at least one of the 23 countries listed is incorrect.
The origins
and meaning of "grabbing the brass ring" came up on my copyediting
email list, and I was reminded of the one and only carousel I've
ridden where you can actually do this, so I've written an
epinion about it.
A good
discussion of the
movement
of the North Magnetic Pole, covering both the scientific
explanation of the Earth's magnetism and why the current location
of the magnetic poles is important. Don't bother dropping a flag
at this pole: the stated location is an average, as the pole drifts
around a roughly elliptical path, and in any case
is moving north by 15 kilometers a year.
A. D. Wyatt Norton is
running for Mayor of San Francisco, on a platform of fixing Muni,
free bicycles, and selling nitrous-oxide-filled condoms from
vending machines. Furthermore, he claims descent from Norton I,
Emperor of
the United States and Protector of Mexico.
In looking
for information on what kinds of cheese can be imported to the
US, I found a
comprehensive
list of permitted plant imports, with some odd restrictions.
The concern is with agriculture, so there are restrictions on
shipping within the United States, especially to and
from Hawaii. For example, it is legal to take coconuts from Hawaii
to the mainland, unless you're going to Florida; I envision a
secretive coconut smuggling ring flying from Honolulu to Atlanta
and then driving south in the dead of night.
A sweet,
moving diary entry on
the
tenth anniversary of the World Series earthquake--and Lucy's
tenth wedding anniversary.
A Web log is a clipping service without portfolio, in which someone collects things she (or he) finds interesting and passes them along. Sort of a primitive version of an anthology: none of the material is actually in the log, all you get is the pointers.
The inspiration for this Web log is Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log, which is well worth a look, and not just because Raphael has been doing this quite a bit longer than I have. Web loggers all seem to read each other's work, but I'm trying not to duplicate too much of what I see elsewhere.
YAWL is broken up into chunks based on size; at the moment that seems to be working out to about two weeks per section. The newest links in each segment are at the top of the page, of course. Stale links are in the nature of such a project, but please let me know if any new links appear broken. Note: dates given here are when I add an item to the log; items are added when I notice them, not necessarily when they first reach the Web.
YAWL is updated most weekdays (sometimes more than once a day) and occasionally on weekends. (For some reason, less of the material I'm interested in is posted on weekends.) However, this is purely an amateur project. If there are no updates for a few days, that might mean I'm traveling or otherwise busy, and not surfing the Web, or just that I haven't come across anything that seems to belong here.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.